Compliance Preorders for Web Services

Compliance is a basic property of web-service architectures that ensures the absence of deadlocks and livelocks during execution. Following recent attempts in the literature, we interpret compliance as an experiment, much like the experiments made by a test process in testing theories, and use it as the basis for a notion of compliance preserving substitution of components within a composition of web services. We review the different notions of compliance in the literature, analyze their relative strengths and weaknesses, and formalize their interrelationships by providing a uniform formal framework where we reconcile the different perspectives that characterize them.